The lonely death of Henry Nowak

“We’ve just been racially attacked by some white person.”

There are multiple levels on which these words, which were spoken to the police by the brother of Vickrum Digwa, who had just stabbed Henry Nowak and then ignored his pleas for medical assistance, are interesting.

Firstly, it is very easy to imagine the police scolding someone who had claimed to be the victim of “some black person” or “some Asian person”. Mate, mate, get a hold of yourself, yeah? That isn’t on, mate. More significantly, though, it is telling that this is the card Digwa chose to play after murdering Mr Nowak.

Initially, it worked. The police turned up and handcuffed Nowak as he lay on the ground and begged for help. The bodycam footage is horrific. “I’ve been stabbed,” Nowak gasps. “I don’t think you have, mate,” sighs a police officer, sounding very much as if he just wants to go home and watch the TV.

“I can’t breathe!” Nowak cries. “Where are you saying you’ve been stabbed?” Another officer asks. “He hasn’t been stabbed,” someone sneers offscreen. “I know, but we have to check,” says the officer. (The first officer has received a lot of stick for his dismissive remarks — and rightly so — but the second officer needs more stick.)

I don’t think that the failures of the police response were entirely due to the sacred nature of accusations of racial bigotry. Quite possibly, they were also just incompetent. Perhaps they were not prepared for the possibility that Digwa’s relatives could be lying to back up his story — displaying extremes of the “in-group affinity” that Chris Bayliss has discussed in these pages as being a neglected factor in modern multicultural life.

The result was the same, with the dying Mr Nowak being forced to hear the indifference and disdain of the police, despite his pleas for help, and despite a witness saying that he had a “mouth full of blood”. It is very, very easy to suspect that politically charged accusations of bigoted language made the officers especially willing to believe that the lone injured white man was the real criminal. In the background of the bodycam footage, as the officers are handcuffing poor Mr Nowak, you can hear what sounds like someone complaining about unaddressed instances of racism.

A few weeks ago, Will Solfiac wrote about how ideological anti-racism, and the demonisation of native racial bigotry as the worst of all sins, has been causing harm in British life. Solfiac raised various incidences of suspicious and pathological behaviour being enabled by the fear of seeming “racist” (the Manchester Arena bombing, the Southport killings, the grooming gangs et cetera). Mr Nowak’s case appears to have been different but similar inasmuch as it involved police overreach. A dying man who posed no threat to anyone was handcuffed and arrested, quite possibly because of the police officers’ unconscious desire to be seen to stand firm in the face of bigotry.

The problem with accusations of bigotry is not that bigotry is not wrong but that it has been elevated to the status of the most wrong thing of all

It is, by the way, completely right for the police — and for us all — to be concerned about racial bigotry. In an extreme case, in April, a white British man was given a life sentence for raping a Sikh woman while shouting anti-Muslim slurs and calling himself a “British master”. Of course the racial animus that could drive such an appalling crime — and other less extreme but nonetheless appalling crimes — should be addressed. 

But the problem with accusations of bigotry is not that bigotry is not wrong — it is — but that it has been elevated to the status of the most wrong thing at all — a kind of Satanic force, the prevalence and malignance of which should not be questioned. So, people can become irrational in order to avoid accusations of bigotry — and to prosecute alleged incidents of bigotry.

A smug and unreasonable elite consensus must be held to account here. Among the people who staff political, cultural and academic institutions, ideas such as “white privilege” are treated as gospel to such an extent that they are even forced onto schoolkids. In the streets, meanwhile, a white teenager bleeds to death while police officers reassure his assailant that, yes, of course they know he isn’t really injured. Where was his privilege? I think we should be told.

An investigation must be held into the police handling of the case. But as Mr Solfiac wrote before this case was in the public eye, questions must also be asked about the irrational extremes of “anti-racism” — an ideology that sounds unimpeachable in its virtuousness until clannish wrongdoers are using it as a trump card to cover up a young man being stabbed and then being allowed to bleed to death.

The family of Mr Nowak has asked that his death not be used to spread division. Where it has been seized upon as an excuse to promote a generalised hostility, their words should be heeded. Where journalists like Dan Hodges have used them as an excuse not to talk about the case at all, though, I’m less convinced. Accountability is not just about addressing past mistakes but about ensuring that such errors do not reoccur in the future, with similar painful or destructive effects.